BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family

by Shalhoup, Mara

  Doc hadn’t been indicted along with the Flenory brothers. But he was named in a related federal indictment filed under seal the same day in Orlando. The indictment charged eight defendants with helping BMF obtain luxury cars outfitted with secret traps for hauling cash and cocaine. And it described Doc as both the leader of the car ring and BMF’s chief financial officer. Eight days after the indictment was filed, on October 28, 2005, Doc was heading home to Atlanta from a meeting in Miami with Slim, Terry’s right-hand man. (Terry required that Doc and Slim meet once a month in person, because the fiscal reports Doc prepared couldn’t be discussed over the phone.) Before Doc made it to his house, he was surrounded by a federal task force. Agents arrested him, and the indictment against him was un-sealed. The feds hinted that more charges would be coming. And they immediately began to discuss with him the benefits of cooperating with the government.

  To investigators, the difficulty of any BMF probe boiled down to the crew’s strict code of silence. Crew members lived by it, and they often pressed the importance of the code upon outsiders who’d witnessed their crimes. The silence was infectious. It was common for police to begin interviewing witnesses, only to find that, once the witnesses learned the identity of the suspects, they’d go south. That had been the problem in the Chaos investigation, after Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’s former bodyguard, Wolf Jones, and Wolf’s childhood friend, Riz Girdy, were killed. The same issue plagued the investigation of the Velvet Room incident, during which Rashannibal “Prince” Drummond was severely beaten and then shot to death. The attack at P. Diddy’s Atlanta restaurant, Justin’s, was no different. Two nephews of R&B superstar Bobby Brown were brutally stabbed—and Brown’s family quickly clammed up.

  But once a potential witness is under indictment, convincing them to talk gets easier. That’s because the authorities have a powerful bargaining chip: the possibility of a shorter prison sentence. Defendants who cooperate typically get 20 percent of their sentence shaved off, sometimes more. If a defendant decides to assist the government, the information he shares often leads to more indictments and additional defendants, which means a larger pool of potential witnesses from which to draw. That was the government’s strategy in its case against the Flenory brothers. And by the time the brothers were arrested, the feds had leads on several insiders who they thought could help build their case.

  One potential witness on Meech’s side seemed particularly promising. Three months before the Flenorys’ indictment and minutes before his cocaine-trafficking trial was set to begin, Omari “O-Dog” McCree surprised a number of people—including Rand Csehy, the assistant district attorney working his case—and decided to plead guilty. For Csehy, the plea was the end of an exhausting wiretap investigation in which he and a handful of Atlanta’s best law enforcement officers (including his close friend, detective Burns) had come within a breath of getting a wire up on Meech’s phone. With Omari’s guilty plea, that local investigation into BMF was nearing its conclusion.

  The feds had taken over the broader investigation, and Csehy wasn’t entirely happy about it. He felt that the Atlanta-based officers were the real heart of the BMF investigation. His disenchantment over the case led to him leaving the DA’s office for private practice—but not before Omari was sentenced to fifteen years in state prison.

  Following the sentencing, the feds swooped into the DA’s office to pull Omari’s file. Omari already had given a statement that implicated Meech. Now, the feds were hoping he’d be willing to make the same claim on the witness stand. In the statement, which Omari delivered to detective Burns and a fellow investigator, he laid out in no uncertain terms that he was part of Big Meech’s cocaine ring. He said he regularly picked up kilos from Meech’s right-hand man, J-Bo, at two locations: the Gate and the Elevator. But at that point in the interview, he got spooked. He refused to say anything else, and he soon

  would try to distance himself from what he did say. Omari didn’t want to be known as a snitch. His attorney worked, unsuccessfully, to have the statement stricken from the court record. But even though the document was ruled fair game, Omari was hesitant to cooperate further. For that and other reasons, the case against Meech wasn’t shaping up as well as prosecutors had hoped.

  As for Terry’s side of the organization, at least one high-ranking crew member quickly turned. In November 2005, Terry’s trusted Detroit manager Arnold “A.R.” Boyd was the first to flip. A.R. had grown up a block away from the Flenory brothers in southwest Detroit and got his start in the organization as Terry’s personal driver. He later assumed the top post in Detroit after his older brother, Benjamin “Blank” Johnson (who’d been a part of the Flenorys’ drug ring since it operated out of their childhood home on Edsel Street), was busted with a kilo of coke. A.R. was part of Terry’s innermost circle. He’d been exposed to many of the most intimate details of Terry’s side of the organization, and he was extremely familiar with his boss’s manipulative managerial style. It appeared to have left A.R. somewhat bitter. He didn’t need much time to decide what he should do. He made a deal with the feds a month after he, the Flenory brothers, and twenty of their associates were indicted. For his cooperation, he’d have four years shaved off his eight to twelve-year sentence.

  A.R. gave the feds a rundown of how he helped Terry shuttle cash and cocaine across the country, in the secret compartments of BMF’s vans and limos. He illustrated how the kilos were processed in the Detroit lab. He described how Terry circumvented the IRS to buy millions of dollars in diamonds from Jacob “the Jeweler” Arabo. He mentioned how, during a trip to Atlanta, he visited the White House—and saw Terry and his top-ranking associates Slim Bivens, Chipped Tooth Peguese, Lil Dog Welch, and Texas Cuz Short, hanging out in the basement where stacks and stacks of kilos were secreted. He described how, during another White House visit, he helped Terry load $250,000 in drug money into the vehicle of Terry’s business partner, Tremayne “Kiki” Graham. The money, A.R. said, was an investment in Kiki’s high-end car dealership, 404 Motorsports.

  Basically, A.R. had a lot to say about Terry. But he hardly had anything to say about Meech. Because he’d been on Terry’s side of the organization, A.R.’s knowledge of Meech’s business was minimal. He was familiar with the basics: that Meech ran the rap label BMF Entertainment; that he oversaw the organization’s Atlanta headquarters; that J-Bo was his second-in-command; and that his close friend, the rapper Bleu DaVinci, had helped out in his cocaine ring. But A.R. didn’t have any firsthand knowledge of those things. As with the majority of witnesses to come, A.R. had plenty of info to share about the quieter, more reserved Flenory brother—and hardly a thing to say about the flashier, more flamboyant one.

  On January 4, 2006, DEA special agent Bob Bell stood before a federal magistrate in Detroit and laid out the government’s case so far against Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory. Prosecutors were trying to convince the judge that Meech was a flight risk and a danger to the community, and therefore should be locked up without bond. To ensure that Meech remained behind bars, they’d have to show there was a sufficient amount of evidence against him. And so the testimony of agent Bell, who worked out of the DEA Detroit office and swapped information with agent Harvey out of Atlanta, was crucial. Bell told the judge that the DEA had interviewed more than twenty-five witnesses in the multi-state investigation into the Black Mafia Family. And ten of them, he claimed, could link Big Meech to the drug trade.

  Drew Findling, the Atlanta lawyer who’d represented Meech for several years (he helped Meech avoid indictment after he was charged with the Chaos double-homicide), wasn’t buying it. He drilled into Bell. Findling wanted to know who these ten witnesses were, and what they’d said. “Is there anybody you’ve interviewed that says they’ve sat down with Demetrius Flenory and discussed the sale and distribution of cocaine?” he asked.

  “I don’t know if they said it just like that,” agent Bell replied. “But one witness comes to mind who says that he or she distributed multiple kil
ograms of cocaine for Demetrius Flenory. And there’s another witness who says that he or she witnessed cocaine being handed back and forth between Demetrius Flenory and others.” Bell didn’t name those witnesses, though. When the judge asked if their identities needed to be kept secret, for safety reasons, Bell said they did.

  Moving on from the subject of confidential witnesses, Bell’s testimony switched gears. He was questioned about Meech’s lifestyle. And on that topic, there was no shortage of detail. The DEA—both Bell in Detroit and Harvey in Atlanta—had conducted an exhaustive inventory of Meech’s excess. Bell began by describing the biggest, most brazen of Meech’s displays. “There are billboards up in the Atlanta, Georgia, area with Demetrius Flenory’s and other folks’ photos on them, advertising BMF Entertainment,” he said. He then gave an account of Meech’s thirty-sixth birthday bash a year earlier. An entire Atlanta mega-club was rented out, half-naked models were hired, and $100,000 in exotic animals was brought in. Then there were the videos that Meech had commissioned in an attempt to draw the attention of big-time record execs. “I’m aware of a DVD in which Demetrius Flenory says he was signing one artist and going to put large volumes of money behind him,” Bell testified. “It was during the time frame when Demetrius Flenory was on house arrest in the Atlanta area for the double-homicide.”

  “Did Demetrius Flenory indicate that his organization, BMF Entertainment, was putting all their money behind Bleu DaVinci?” assistant U.S. Attorney Dawn Ison asked.

  “Yes,” Bell said.

  “And did he mention a specific amount that they were putting behind this one artist?”

  “He at one point mentioned five-hundred-thousand dollars. At another point, he mentioned a million dollars.”

  Toward the end of the three-hour bond hearing, Ison told the judge that Meech had all the markings of a big-time drug trafficker. She claimed he hadn’t filed taxes in years and had no verifiable income. She cited as many as ten aliases, many of them with corresponding fake driver’s licenses. She said he certainly partied like a kingpin. She pointed out that his brother, Terry, in a wiretapped phone conversation, complained that Meech’s lifestyle was spiraling out of control. And though Meech hadn’t been caught with cocaine in hand, Ison said that the sheer quantity of kilos the organization was believed to have trafficked should be incentive enough to deny bond. “Based on the amount of drugs involved,” Ison said, “this is probably the highest-volume drug conspiracy in this district, ever.”

  Findling was quick to admit that his client very well might be guilty of decadence. He also pointed out that decadence is not a crime. “What strikes me not only about this indictment, Your Honor, but about the testimony today, is we essentially heard that Demetrius Flenory lives a flamboyant lifestyle,” Findling said. “There is no specific reference in the testimony to Demetrius Flenory participating in a singular act of the distribution of cocaine. It’s just the aura of Demetrius Flenory. It’s the aura of homes. The aura of cars. The aura of money. The aura of rap.”

  Magistrate Judge Steven Whalen quickly hinted that he might be willing to grant Meech bond—in part because Meech’s ego seemed too big for him to escape. “Really, in a lot of ways Mr. Flenory is his own worst enemy,” Whalen said from the bench. “The magazine articles, the billboards, the big mouth, the lavish lifestyle. The positive side of that is he’s an individual who does have a high profile, and in a perverse kind of way, that works to his benefit in terms of assuring that he’s going to appear.”

  Whalen said Meech’s ostentatious behavior, though not illegal in and of itself, was somewhat incriminating. He also said that compared with the case against his brother, who’d been denied bond at a hearing a few weeks earlier, the case against Meech seemed more weak. “There is a lot of evidence that he’s sort of around this organization,” the judge said. “His brother certainly is portrayed as a leader of this organization. But as far as what he actually did, that remains pretty ambiguous to me. And although there’s probable cause, I don’t think there’s necessarily overwhelming evidence based on what I’ve heard today. And that’s all I have to rule on, what I’ve heard today.”

  Over the outcry of the prosecutor, Judge Whalen ruled to release Meech on a $100,000 unsecured bond, meaning there’d be no asset, such as a home, offered as collateral in the event he fled. Meech would be required to wear an ankle monitor, the judge said, and to live under house arrest with his mother in Detroit. A month later, another judge ruled to allow bond for Terry—even after the court’s initial determination that he was too great a flight risk. Terry was ordered to pay his $150,000 bond up front, and he was to be released to the custody of his father.

  The prosecution launched a vigorous battle against the rulings to allow the Flenory brothers to walk. In Terry’s case, the U.S. Attorney’s Office claimed the defendant could easily skip out on his bond. He likely had cash secreted away that far exceeded the $150,000 bond. To Terry, the bond money could be viewed as the price of freedom—a ticket he could easily afford. “BMF members are known to be hiding in Mexico or have been intercepted talking about fleeing to Mexico,” prosecutor Ison wrote in paperwork she filed to reverse Terry’s bond. Terry Flenory, Ison claimed, “has the ability to become a real, international fugitive.”

  Terry’s wealth was far more tangible than Meech’s. Terry had been caught on a wiretap talking about his recent purchase of a $195,000 Bentley. The feds were able to prove that he lived in a $3 million house on L.A.’s Mulholland Drive. He’d been pulled over in Illinois with $5 million in jewelry. And at the house in St. Louis where he’d been arrested, agents found $600,000 cash.

  Within a month, before either brother was allowed to post bond, a different judge reversed the earlier rulings. Neither Meech nor Terry would be allowed to leave jail after all. The court proceedings would progress slowly, with both brothers forced to spend years in separate county lockups. And the stakes in the case were about to get higher.

  Doc Marshall knew what he’d be looking at if he were convicted: twenty years. Even if he were to plead guilty and spare the feds the trouble of a trial—an act that likely would be rewarded with the dismissal of a charge or two, and a low-end sentence on the charges that remained—he’d still be locked up for well over a decade. His situation was grim, but he did have options. He also had one of the best lawyers in Atlanta. Doc’s attorney, Steve Sadow, had helped Baltimore Raven Ray Lewis beat a highly publicized murder rap stemming from a Super Bowl 2000 after-party. Years later, Sadow would be part of a legal dream team that snared a mere yearlong sentence for hip-hop superstar T.I., who faced a decade in prison on federal machine gun charges. Sadow arguably was the best defense money could buy. Yet in the end, there wasn’t much the lawyer could offer Doc. The CFO already had made up his mind. He was going to cooperate. And for that, Doc didn’t need a high-priced attorney. Once Sadow negotiated the plea deal, he gave Doc the only advice he’d need: Tell the truth.

  Doc first met with the feds on March 7, 2006, less than two months after Meech’s bond hearing. Over the course of the year, he laid out the details of his involvement with no less than seventy of BMF’s major players. He also confessed to how much coke he’d moved himself. The number startled his interrogators, including agent Harvey and detective Burns. They knew Doc to be the moneyman, a numbers cruncher. But they didn’t realize he was a major drug distributor, too. Not until he told them that he moved nearly two thousand kilos in three years did they come to realize how significant Doc truly was.

  Doc described how in late 2003 and early 2004, he’d go to the White House once a week to grab ten kilos or more. By then, he said, Terry had wrenched control of the house from Meech. Meech had nothing to do with the mansion anymore. During most of Doc’s visits, he picked up his shipment from one of Terry’s top managers, Michael “Freak” Green. On other occasions, he’d get the coke from Slim, Texas Cuz, or Terry himself. Doc also met regularly with Terry, both at the White House and elsewhere, to advise him on his finances. T
erry wanted to move his drug money into his girlfriend’s bank accounts, since she had a company (set up for her by Terry) in her name. Doc helped Terry funnel the cash to her in such a way that avoided federal detection. He also helped Terry find legitimate investments in which he could safely sink his drug money. Any company that made a profit would suffice. At one point, Doc even laundered Terry’s drug money through a daycare.

  Doc conducted business separately with Meech. As with Terry, he prepared spreadsheets for Meech that itemized his spending. In any given month, there were tens of thousands of dollars in first-class airline tickets for his crew; a similar amount to cover the car notes on the Maybachs, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Porsches that he and his associates drove; and a seemingly exorbitant fifty thousand dollars to cover a month’s rent at a Miami mansion, which actually amounted to less than putting up crew members in individual hotel rooms.

  Doc also described what went on inside Meech’s stash houses. At the Gate, a handsome traditional home that sat well off the road in a wooded, residential part of Buckhead, kilos of cocaine were stuffed into duffel bags and passed out in the common room, in plain view of the pool table where BMF’s customers congregated. Doc said the house held two hundred or so kilos every ten days—until Meech, wary that the feds were close at hand, ordered that the operation be moved to Space Mountain.

  Doc never knew Meech to set foot inside the Gate. The boss was too careful to get that close to his shipment. Yet Doc did visit with Meech at the brick town house where he lived, the Elevator. Doc had helped Meech procure the home in the name of a straw purchaser. The Elevator was considered a safe, insulated place. Meech held regular meetings there for his most trusted crew members. And Doc was in a better position than most to describe to the feds, with authority, the rank of Meech’s crew—most of whom hadn’t yet been charged. Doc told the feds that Chad “J-Bo” Brown was right under Meech, followed by Meech’s top-level managers Fleming “Ill” Daniels and Martez “Tito” Byrth. He also said that Meech’s drug associates included the rapper Bleu DaVinci. In all, Doc identified more than a dozen BMF members who hadn’t yet been indicted—but soon would be. In the years to come, he’d take the stand in front of juries and grand juries in Detroit, Orlando, Nashville, and Greenville. Doc was polite and confident on the stand, and nothing he said was discredited. As a result, he was sentenced to only eight years in prison. Even after his sentencing, he continued to offer information to the government—and to find himself on the receiving end of threats including a razor blade slipped into his plate of jail food.